The Green Flag, by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Green Flag

When Jack Conolly, of the Irish Shotgun Brigade, the Rory of the Hills Inner Circle, and the extreme
left wing of the Land League, was incontinently shot by Sergeant Murdoch of the constabulary, in a little moonlight
frolic near Kanturk, his twin-brother Dennis joined the British Army. The countryside had become too hot for him; and,
as the seventy-five shillings were wanting which might have carried him to America, he took the only way handy of
getting himself out of the way. Seldom has Her Majesty had a less promising recruit, for his hot Celtic blood seethed
with hatred against Britain and all things British. The sergeant, however, smiling complacently over his 6 ft. of brawn
and his 44 in. chest, whisked him off with a dozen other of the boys to the depot at Fermoy, whence in a few weeks they
were sent on, with the spade-work kinks taken out of their backs, to the first battalion of the Royal Mallows, at the
top of the roster for foreign service.

The Royal Mallows, at about that date, were as strange a lot of men as ever were paid by a great empire to fight its
battles. It was the darkest hour of the land struggle, when the one side came out with crow-bar and battering-ram by
day, and the other with mask and with shot-gun by night. Men driven from their homes and potato-patches found their way
even into the service of the Government, to which it seemed to them that they owed their troubles, and now and then
they did wild things before they came. There were recruits in the Irish regiments who would forget to answer to their
own names, so short had been their acquaintance with them. Of these the Royal Mallows had their full share; and, while
they still retained their fame as being one of the smartest corps in the army, no one knew better than their officers
that they were dry-rotted with treason and with bitter hatred of the flag under which they served.

And the centre of all the disaffection was C Company, in which Dennis Conolly found himself enrolled. They were
Celts, Catholics, and men of the tenant class to a man; and their whole experience of the British Government had been
an inexorable landlord, and a constabulary who seemed to them to be always on the side of the rent-collector. Dennis
was not the only moonlighter in the ranks, nor was he alone in having an intolerable family blood-feud to harden his
heart. Savagery had begotten savagery in that veiled civil war. A landlord with an iron mortgage weighing down upon him
had small bowels for his tenantry. He did but take what the law allowed, and yet, with men like Jim Holan, or Patrick
McQuire, or Peter Flynn, who had seen the roofs torn from their cottages and their folk huddled among their pitiable
furniture upon the roadside, it was ill to argue about abstract law. What matter that in that long and bitter struggle
there was many another outrage on the part of the tenant, and many another grievance on the side of the landowner! A
stricken man can only feel his own wound, and the rank and file of the C Company of the Royal Mallows were sore and
savage to the soul. There were low whisperings in barrack-rooms and canteens, stealthy meetings in public-house
parlours, bandying of passwords from mouth to mouth, and many other signs which made their officers right glad when the
order came which sent them to foreign, and better still, to active service.

For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a distance looked upon the foe as though he might,
in truth, be the friend; but when they have been put face on to him, and when their officers have dashed to the front
with a wave and halloo, those rebel hearts have softened and their gallant Celtic blood has boiled with the mad Joy of
the fight, until the slower Britons have marvelled that they ever could have doubted the loyalty of their Irish
comrades. So it would be again, according to the officers, and so it would not be if Dennis Conolly and a few others
could have their way.

It was a March morning upon the eastern fringe of the Nubian desert. The sun had not yet risen, but a tinge of pink
flushed up as far as the cloudless zenith, and the long strip of sea lay like a rosy ribbon across the horizon. From
the coast inland stretched dreary sand-plains, dotted over with thick clumps at mimosa scrub and mottled patches of
thorny bush. No tree broke the monotony of that vast desert. The dull, dusty hue of the thickets, and the yellow glare
of the sand, were the only colours, save at one point, where, from a distance, it seemed that a land-slip of snow-white
stones had shot itself across a low foot-hill. But as the traveller approached he saw, with a thrill, that these were
no stones, but the bleaching bones of a slaughtered army. With its dull tints, its gnarled, viprous bushes, its arid,
barren soil, and this death streak trailed across it, it was indeed a nightmare country.

Some eight or ten miles inland the rolling plain curved upwards with a steeper slope until it ran into a line of red
basaltic rock which zigzagged from north to south, heaping itself up at one point into a fantastic knoll. On the summit
of this there stood upon that March morning three Arab chieftains — the Sheik Kadra of the Hadendowas, Moussa Wad
Aburhegel, who led the Berber dervishes, and Hamid Wad Hussein, who had come northward with his fighting men from the
land of the Baggaras. They had all three just risen from their praying-carpets, and were peering out, with fierce,
high-nosed faces thrust forwards, at the stretch of country revealed by the spreading dawn.

The red rim of the sun was pushing itself now above the distant sea, and the whole coast-line stood out brilliantly
yellow against the rich deep blue beyond. At one spot lay a huddle of white-walled houses, a mere splotch in the
distance; while four tiny cock-boats, which lay beyond, marked the position of three of Her Majesty’s 10,000-ton
troopers and the admiral’s flagship. But it was not upon the distant town, nor upon the great vessels, nor yet upon the
sinister white litter which gleamed in the plain beneath them, that the Arab chieftains gazed. Two miles from where
they stood, amid the sand-hills and the mimosa scrub, a great parallelogram had been marked by piled-up bushes. From
the inside of this dozens of tiny blue smoke-reeks curled up into the still morning air; while there rose from it a
confused deep murmur, the voices of men and the gruntings of camels blended into the same insect buzz.

“The unbelievers have cooked their morning food,” said the Baggara chief, shading his eyes with his tawny, sinewy
hand. “Truly their sleep has been scanty; for Hamid and a hundred of his men have fired upon them since the rising of
the moon.”

“So it was with these others,” answered the Sheik Kadra, pointing with his sheathed sword towards the old
battle-field. “They also had a day of little water and a night of little rest, and the heart was gone out of them ere
ever the sons of the Prophet had looked them in the eyes. This blade drank deep that day, and will again before the sun
has travelled from the sea to the hill.”

“And yet these are other men,” remarked the Berber dervish. “Well, I know that Allah has placed them in the clutch
of our fingers, yet it may be that they with the big hats will stand firmer than the cursed men of Egypt.”

“Pray Allah that it may be so,” cried the fierce Baggara, with a flash of his black eyes. “It was not to chase women
that I brought 700 men from the river to the coast. See, my brother, already they are forming their array.”

A fanfare of bugle-calls burst from the distant camp. At the same time the bank of bushes at one side had been
thrown or trampled down, and the little army within began to move slowly out on to the plain. Once clear of the camp
they halted, and the slant rays of the sun struck flashes from bayonet and from gun-barrel as the ranks closed up until
the big pith helmets joined into a single long white ribbon. Two streaks of scarlet glowed on either side of the
square, but elsewhere the fringe of fighting-men was of the dull yellow khaki tint which hardly shows against the
desert sand. Inside their array was a dense mass of camels and mules bearing stores and ambulance needs. Outside a
twinkling clump of cavalry was drawn up on each flank, and in front a thin, scattered line of mounted infantry was
already slowly advancing over the bush-strewn plain, halting on every eminence, and peering warily round as men might
who have to pick their steps among the bones of those who have preceded them.

The three chieftains still lingered upon the knoll, looking down with hungry eyes and compressed lips at the dark
steel-tipped patch. “They are slower to start than the men of Egypt,” the Sheik of the Hadendowas growled in his
beard.

“And we 10,000, with the Prophet’s grip upon our spear-hafts and his words upon our banner. See to their chieftain,
how he rides upon the right and looks up at us with the glass that sees from afar! It may be that he sees this also.”
The Arab shook his sword at the small clump of horsemen who had spurred out from the square.

“Lo! he beckons,” cried the dervish; “and see those others at the corner, how they bend and heave. Ha! by the
Prophet, I had thought it.” As he spoke, a little woolly puff of smoke spurted up at the corner of the square, and a 7
lb. shell burst with a hard metallic smack just over their heads. The splinters knocked chips from the red rocks around
them.

“Bismillah!” cried the Hadendowa; “if the gun can carry thus far, then ours can answer to it. Ride to the left,
Moussa, and tell Ben Ali to cut the skin from the Egyptians if they cannot hit yonder mark. And you, Hamid, to the
right, and see that 3,000 men lie close in the wady that we have chosen. Let the others beat the drum and show the
banner of the Prophet, for by the black stone their spears will have drunk deep ere they look upon the stars
again.”

A long, straggling, boulder-strewn plateau lay on the summit of the red hills, sloping very precipitously to the
plain, save at one point, where a winding gully curved downwards, its mouth choked with sand-mounds and olive-hued
scrub. Along the edge of this position lay the Arab host — a motley crew of shock-headed desert clansmen, fierce
predatory slave dealers of the interior, and wild dervishes from the Upper Nile, all blent together by their common
fearlessness and fanaticism. Two races were there, as wide as the poles apart — the thin-lipped, straight-haired Arab
and the thick-lipped, curly negro — yet the faith of Islam had bound them closer than a blood tie. Squatting among the
rocks, or lying thickly in the shadow, they peered out at the slow-moving square beneath them, while women with
water-skins and bags of dhoora fluttered from group to group, calling out to each other those fighting texts from the
Koran which in the hour of battle are maddening as wine to the true believer. A score of banners waved over the ragged,
valiant crew, and among them, upon desert horses and white Bishareen camels, were the Emirs and Sheiks who were to lead
them against the infidels.

As the Sheik Kadra sprang into his saddle and drew his sword there was a wild whoop and a clatter of waving spears,
while the one-ended war-drums burst into a dull crash like a wave upon shingle. For a moment 10,000 men were up on the
rocks with brandished arms and leaping figures; the next they were under cover again, waiting sternly and silently for
their chieftain’s orders. The square was less than half a mile from the ridge now, and shell after shell from the 7 lb.
guns were pitching over it. A deep roar on the right, and then a second one showed that the Egyptian Krupps were in
action. Sheik Kadra’s hawk eyes saw that the shells burst far beyond the mark, and he spurred his horse along to where
a knot of mounted chiefs were gathered round the two guns, which were served by their captured crews.

“How is this, Ben Ali?” he cried. “It was not thus that the dogs fired when it was their own brothers in faith at
whom they aimed!”

A chieftain reined his horse back, and thrust a blood-smeared sword into its sheath. Beside him two Egyptian
artillerymen with their throats cut were sobbing out their lives upon the ground. “Who lays the gun this time?” asked
the fierce chief, glaring at the frightened gunners.” Here, thou black-browed child of Shaitan, aim, and aim for thy
life.”

It may have been chance, or it may have been skill, but the third and fourth shells burst over the square. Sheik
Kadra smiled grimly and galloped back to the left, where his spearmen were streaming down into the gully. As he joined
them a deep growling rose from the plain beneath, like the snarling of a sullen wild beast, and a little knot of
tribesmen fell into a struggling heap, caught in the blast of lead from a Gardner. Their comrades pressed on over them,
and sprang down into the ravine. From all along the crest burst the hard, sharp crackle of Remington fire.

The square had slowly advanced, rippling over the low sandhills, and halting every few minutes to re-arrange its
formation. Now, having made sure that there was no force of the enemy in the scrub, it changed its direction, and began
to take a line parallel to the Arab position. It was too steep to assail from the front, and if they moved far enough
to the right the general hoped that he might turn it. On the top of those ruddy hills lay a baronetcy for him, and a
few extra hundreds in his pension, and he meant having them both that day. The Remington fire was annoying, and so were
those two Krupp guns; already there were more cacolets full than he cared to see. But on the whole he thought it better
to hold his fire until he had more to aim at than a few hundred of fuzzy heads peeping over a razor-back ridge. He was
a bulky, red-faced man, a fine whist-player, and a soldier who knew his work. His men believed in him, and he had good
reason to believe in them, for he had excellent stuff under him that day. Being an ardent champion of the short-service
system, he took particular care to work with veteran first battalions, and his little force was the compressed essence
of an army corps.

The left front of the square was formed by four companies of the Royal Wessex, and the right by four of the Royal
Mallows. On either side the other halves of the same regiments marched in quarter column of companies. Behind them, on
the right was a battalion of Guards, and on the left one of Marines, while the rear was closed in by a Rifle battalion.
Two Royal Artillery 7 lb. screw-guns kept pace with the square, and a dozen white-bloused sailors, under their
blue-coated, tight-waisted officers, trailed their Gardner in front, turning every now and then to spit up at the
draggled banners which waved over the cragged ridge. Hussars and Lancers scouted in the scrub at each side, and within
moved the clump of camels, with humorous eyes and supercilious lips, their comic faces a contrast to the blood-stained
men who already lay huddled in the cacolets on either side.

The square was now moving slowly on a line parallel with the rocks, stopping every few minutes to pick up wounded,
and to allow the screw-guns and Gardner to make themselves felt. The men looked serious, for that spring on to the
rocks of the Arab army had given them a vague glimpse of the number and ferocity of their foes; but their faces were
set like stone, for they knew to a man that they must win or they must die — and die, too, in a particularly unlovely
fashion. But most serious of all was the general, for he had seen that which brought a flush to his cheeks and a frown
to his brow.

“I say, Stephen,” said he to his galloper, “those Mallows seem a trifle jumpy. The right flank company bulged a bit
when the niggers showed on the hill.”

“Youngest troops in the square, sir,” murmured the aide, looking at them critically through his eye-glass.

“Tell Colonel Flanagan to see to it, Stephen,” said the general; and the galloper sped upon his way. The colonel, a
fine old Celtic warrior, was over at C Company in an instant.

“How are the men, Captain Foley?”

“Never better, sir,” answered the senior captain, in the spirit that makes a Madras officer look murder if you
suggest recruiting his regiment from the Punjab.

“Stiffen them up!” cried the colonel. As he rode away a colour-sergeant seemed to trip, and fell forward into a
mimosa bush. He made no effort to rise, but lay in a heap among the thorns.

“Sergeant O’Rooke’s gone, sorr,” cried a voice. “Never mind, lads,” said Captain Foley. “He’s died like a soldier,
fighting for his Queen.”

“Down with the Queen!” shouted a hoarse voice from the ranks.

But the roar of the Gardner and the typewriter-like clicking of the hopper burst in at the tail of the words.
Captain Foley heard them, and Subalterns Grice and Murphy heard them; but there are times when a deaf ear is a gift
from the gods.

“Steady, Mallows!” cried the captain, in a pause of the grunting machine-gun. “We have the honour of Ireland to
guard this day.”

“And well we know how to guard it, captin!” cried the same ominous voice; and there was a buzz from the length of
the company.

The captain and the two subs. came together behind the marching line.

“They seem a bit out of hand,” murmured the captain.

“Bedad,” said the Galway boy, “they mean to scoot like redshanks.”

“They nearly broke when the blacks showed on the hill,” said Grice.

“The first man that turns, my sword is through him,” cried Foley, loud enough to be heard by five files on either
side of him. Then, in a lower voice, “It’s a bitter drop to swallow, but it’s my duty to report what you think to the
chief, and have a company of Jollies put behind us.” He turned away with the safety of the square upon his mind, and
before he had reached his goal the square had ceased to exist.

In their march in front of what looked like a face of cliff, they had come opposite to the mouth of the gully, in
which, screened by scrub and boulders, 3,000 chosen dervishes, under Hamid Wad Hussein, of the Baggaras, were
crouching. Tat, tat, tat, went the rifles of three mounted infantrymen in front of the left shoulder of the square, and
an instant later they wore spurring it for their lives, crouching over the manes of their horses, and pelting over the
sandhills with thirty or forty galloping chieftains at their heels. Rocks and scrub and mimosa swarmed suddenly into
life. Rushing black figures came and went in the gaps of the bushes. A howl that drowned the shouts of the officers, a
long quavering yell, burst from the ambuscade. Two rolling volleys from the Royal Wessex, one crash from the screw-gun
firing shrapnel, and then before a second cartridge could be rammed in, a living, glistening black wave, tipped with
steel, had rolled over the gun, the Royal Wessex had been dashed back among the camels, and 1,000 fanatics were hewing
and hacking in the heart of what had been the square.

The camels and mules in the centre, jammed more and more together as their leaders flinched from the rush of the
tribesmen, shut out the view of the other three faces, who could only tell that the Arabs had got in by the yells upon
Allah, which rose ever nearer and nearer amid the clouds of sand-dust, the struggling animals, and the dense mass of
swaying, cursing men. Some of the Wessex fired back at the Arabs who had passed them, as excited Tommies will, and it
is whispered among doctors that it was not always a Remington bullet which was cut from a wound that day. Some rallied
in little knots, stabbing furiously with their bayonets at the rushing spearmen. Others turned at bay with their backs
against the camels, and others round the general and his staff, who, revolver in hand, had flung themselves into the
heart of it. But the whole square was sidling slowly away from the gorge, pushed back by the pressure at the shattered
corner.

The officers and men at the other faces were glancing nervously to the rear, uncertain what was going on, and unable
to take help to their comrades without breaking the formation.

“By Jove, they’ve got through the Wessex!” cried Grice of the Mallows.

“The divils have hurrooshed us, Ted,” said his brother subaltern, cocking his revolver.

The ranks were breaking, and crowding towards Private Conolly, all talking together as the officers peered back
through the veil of dust. The sailors had run their Gardner out, and she was squirting death out of her five barrels
into the flank of the rushing stream of savages. “Oh, this bloody gun!” shouted a voice. “She’s jammed again.” The
fierce metallic grunting had ceased, and her crew were straining and hauling at the breech.

“This damned vertical feed!” cried an officer.

“The spanner, Wilson!— the spanner! Stand to your cutlasses, boys, or they’re into us.” His voice rose into a shriek
as he ended, for a shovel-headed spear had been buried in his chest. A second wave of dervishes lapped over the
hillocks, and burst upon the machine-gun and the right front of the line. The sailors were overborne in an instant, but
the Mallows, with their fighting blood aflame, met the yell of the Moslem with an even wilder, fiercer cry, and dropped
two hundred of them with a single point-blank volley. The howling, leaping crew swerved away to the right, and dashed
on into the gap which had already been made for them.

But C Company had drawn no trigger to stop that fiery rush. The men leaned moodily upon their Martinis. Some had
even thrown them upon the ground. Conolly was talking fiercely to those about him. Captain Foley, thrusting his way
through the press, rushed up to him with a revolver in his hand.

“This is your doing, you villain!” he cried.

“If you raise your pistol, Captin, your brains will be over your coat,” said a low voice at his side.

He saw that several rifles were turned on him. The two subs. had pressed forward, and were by his side. “What is it,
then?” he cried, looking round from one fierce mutinous face to another. “Are you Irishmen? Are you soldiers? What are
you here for but to fight for your country?”

“England is no country of ours,” cried several.

“You are not fighting for England. You are fighting for Ireland, and for the Empire of which it as part.”

“A black curse on the Impire!” shouted Private McQuire, throwing down his rifle. “’Twas the Impire that backed the
man that druv me onto the roadside. May me hand stiffen before I draw trigger for it.

“What’s the Impire to us, Captain Foley, and what’s the Widdy to us ayther?” cried a voice.

“Let the constabulary foight for her.”

“Ay, be God, they’d be better imployed than pullin’ a poor man’s thatch about his ears.”

“Or shootin’ his brother, as they did mine.”

“It was the Impire laid my groanin’ mother by the wayside. Her son will rot before he upholds it, and ye can put
that in the charge-sheet in the next coort-martial.”

In vain the three officers begged, menaced, persuaded. The square was still moving, ever moving, with the same
bloody fight raging in its entrails. Even while they had been speaking they had been shuffling backwards, and the
useless Gardner, with her slaughtered crew, was already a good hundred yards from them. And the pace was accelerating.
The mass of men, tormented and writhing, was trying, by a common instinct, to reach some clearer ground where they
could re-form. Three faces were still intact, but the fourth had been caved in, and badly mauled, without its comrades
being able to help it. The Guards had met a fresh rush of the Hadendowas, and had blown back the tribesmen with a
volley, and the cavalry had ridden over another stream of them, as they welled out of the gully. A litter of hamstrung
horses, and haggled men behind them, showed that a spearman on his face among the bushes can show some sport to the man
who charges him. But, in spite of all, the square was still reeling swiftly backwards, trying to shake itself clear of
this torment which clung to its heart. Would it break or would it re-form? The lives of five regiments and the honour
of the flag hung upon the answer.

Some, at least, were breaking. The C Company of the Mallows had lost all military order, and was pushing back in
spite of the haggard officers, who cursed, and shoved, and prayed in the vain attempt to hold them. The captain and the
subs. were elbowed and jostled, while the men crowded towards Private Conolly for their orders. The confusion had not
spread, for the other companies, in the dust and smoke and turmoil, had lost touch with their mutinous comrades.
Captain Foley saw that even now there might be time to avert a disaster. “Think what you are doing, man,” he yelled,
rushing towards the ringleader. “There are a thousand Irish in the square, and they are dead men if we break.”

The words alone might have had little effect on the old moonlighter. It is possible that, in his scheming brain, he
had already planned how he was to club his Irish together and lead them to the sea. But at that moment the Arabs broke
through the screen of camels which had fended them off. There was a Struggle, a screaming, a mule rolled over, a
wounded man sprang up in a cacolet with a spear through him, and then through the narrow gap surged a stream of naked
savages, mad with battle, drunk with slaughter, spotted and splashed with blood — blood dripping from their spears,
their arms, their faces. Their yells, their bounds, their crouching, darting figures, the horrid energy of their
spear-thrusts, made them look like a blast of fiends from the pit. And were these the Allies of Ireland? Were these the
men who were to strike for her against her enemies? Conolly’s soul rose up in loathing at the thought.

He was a man of firm purpose, and yet at the first sight of those howling fiends that purpose faltered, and at the
second it was blown to the winds. He saw a huge coal-black negro seize a shrieking camel-driver and saw at his throat
with a knife. He saw a shock-headed tribesman plunge his great spear through the back of their own little bugler from
Mill-street. He saw a dozen deeds of blood — the murder of the wounded, the hacking of the unarmed — and caught, too,
in a glance, the good wholesome faces of the faced-about rear rank of the Marines. The Mallows, too, had faced about,
and in an instant Conolly had thrown himself into the heart of C Company, striving with the officers to form the men up
with their comrades.

But the mischief had gone too far. The rank and file had no heart in their work. They had broken before, and this
last rush of murderous savages was a hard thing for broken men to stand against. They flinched from the furious faces
and dripping forearms. Why should they throw away their lives for a flag for which they cared nothing? Why should their
leader urge them to break, and now shriek to them to re-form? They would not re-form. They wanted to get to the sea and
to safety. He flung himself among them with outstretched arms, with words of reason, with shouts, with gaspings. It was
useless; the tide was beyond his control. They were shredding out into the desert with their faces set for the
coast.

“Bhoys, will ye stand for this?” screamed a voice. It was so ringing, so strenuous, that the breaking Mallows
glanced backwards. They were held by what they saw. Private Conolly had planted his rifle-stock downwards in a mimosa
bush. From the fixed bayonet there fluttered a little green flag with the crownless harp. God knows for what black
mutiny, for what signal of revolt, that flag had been treasured up within the corporal’s tunic! Now its green wisp
stood amid the rush, while three proud regimental colours were reeling slowly backwards.

“What for the flag?” yelled the private.

“My heart’s blood for it! and mine! and mine!” cried a score of voices. “God bless it! The flag, boys — the
flag!”

C Company were rallying upon it. The stragglers clutched at each other, and pointed. “Here, McQuire, Flynn, O’Hara,”
ran the shoutings. “Close on the flag! Back to the flag!” The three standards reeled backwards, and the seething square
strove for a clearer space where they could form their shattered ranks; but C Company, grim and powder-stained, choked
with enemies and falling fast, still closed in on the little rebel ensign that flapped from the mimosa bush.

It was a good half-hour before the square, having disentangled itself from its difficulties and dressed its ranks,
began to slowly move forwards over the ground, across which in its labour and anguish it had been driven. The long
trail of Wessex men and Arabs showed but too clearly the path they had come.

“How many got into us, Stephen?” asked the general, tapping his snuff-box.

“I should put them down at a thousand or twelve hundred, sir.”

“I did not see any get out again. What the devil were the Wessex thinking about? The Guards stood well, though; so
did the Mallows.”

“Colonel Flanagan reports that his front flank company was cut off, sir.”

“Why, that’s the company that was out of hand when we advanced!”

“Colonel Flanagan reports, sir, that the company took the whole brunt of the attack, and gave the square time to
re-form.”

“Tell the Hussars to ride forward, Stephen,” said the general, “and try if they can see anything of them. There’s no
firing, and I fear that the Mallows will want to do some recruiting. Let the square take ground by the right, and then
advance!”

But the Sheik Kadra of the Hadendowas saw from his knoll that the men with the big hats had rallied, and that they
were coming back in the quiet business fashion of men whose work was before them. He took counsel with Moussa the
Dervish and Hussein the Baggara, and a woestruck man was he when he learned that the third of his men were safe in the
Moslem Paradise. So, having still some signs of victory to show, he gave the word, and the desert warriors flitted off
unseen and unheard, even as they had come.

A red rock plateau, a few hundred spears and Remingtons, and a plain which for the second time was strewn with
slaughtered men, was all that his day’s fighting gave to the English general.

It was a squadron of Hussars which came first to the spot where the rebel flag had waved. A dense litter of Arab
dead marked the place. Within, the flag waved no longer, but the rifle stood in the mimosa bush, and round it, with
their wounds in front, lay the Fenian private and the silent ranks of the Irishry. Sentiment is not an English failing,
but the Hussar captain raised his hilt in a salute as he rode past the blood-soaked ring.

The British general sent home dispatches to his Government, and so did the chief of the Hadendowas, though the style
and manner differed somewhat in each.

The Sheik Kadra of the Hadendowa people to Mohammed Ahmed, the chosen of Allah, homage and greeting, (began the
latter). Know by this that on the fourth day of this moon we gave battle to the Kaffirs who call themselves Inglees,
having with us the Chief Hussein with ten thousand of the faithful. By the blessing of Allah we have broken them, and
chased them for a mile, though indeed these infidels are different from the dogs of Egypt, and have slain very many of
our men. Yet we hope to smite them again ere the new moon be come, to which end I trust that thou wilt send us a
thousand Dervishes from Omdurman. In token of our victory I send you by this messenger a flag which we have taken. By
the colour it might well seem to have belonged to those of the true faith, but the Kaffirs gave their blood freely to
save it, and so we think that, though small, it is very dear to them.